CHICAGO, IL.- The Art Institute of Chicago shared a selection of our most exciting acquisitions of 2024.

This year, the museum added more than 1,000 new works to its permanent collection, expanding multiple departments with works ranging from southern African beadwork to rarely-viewed surrealist paintings. These impressive additions further the museum’s commitment to diversifying its iconic collection across time, geographies, artistic movements, and mediums. Below are examples of some of the critical works that are building our collection, including familiar, beloved artists as well as new, important voices.

Architecture and Design

Michael Maltzan Architecture, Star Apartments.

Los Angeles-based architect Michael Maltzan is known for an array of projects that contribute to the public realm through rational, innovative, and pragmatic designs. Completed in 2014, Star Apartments by Michael Maltzan Architecture provides permanent supportive housing to formerly unhoused people, offering public health resources, recreational facilities, and social services. Once the apartments were occupied, Maltzan created 1:12 scale dioramas of resident’s homes recreated from site visits, photographs, and interviews. These models reinforce the idea that housing, which offers space for both self-expression and comfort, can restore dignity and well-being. Five of these models are now on view in Gallery 285.

Arts of Africa

Southern Sotho, Lesotho or South Africa, Fertility Figure.

Commonly made by women in southern Africa, child or fertility figures are abstract, three-dimensional representations of a child made of colorful glass beads. These figures were given and cared for by future mothers as if they were a living newborn prior to childbirth. Fertility Figure from Southern Sotho, Lesotho is an exceptionally well-preserved example of these figures, which are still in existence today. Its addition to our collection not only enhances our holdings of the important genre of southern African bead art and works by African women artists, but also stands as the first work from the nation of Lesotho to enter our permanent collection.

Arts of Asia

Soga Shōhaku 曾我 蕭白, Mount Fuji and the Miho Pine Forest 富士三保松原図屏風.

This pair of folding screens are by one of the best-known painters in Japan, Soga Shōhaku, revered for his unusual subjects and eccentric painting style. They are one of the most important Japanese works of art to enter a U.S. collection from Japan by any artist and in any medium in decades. Shōhaku’s unparalleled technical skills with ink painting and irreverence towards traditional norms are on full display, and the iconic subject of Mount Fuji paired with the rising dragon is the quintessential symbol of Japan. The inclusion of a dragon is particularly meaningful, as homonyms in Japanese for “Fuji” and “dragon” combine to create the meaning of “removing all unhappiness.” One of two panels is now on view in Gallery 109.

Arts of the Americas

Grandma Moses, The Cambridge Valley.

The Cambridge Valley by Grandma Moses, one of the most popular American painters of the twentieth century, is one of four early canvases given to the museum by the artists’ descendants and collector Sidney Janis. Her works conveyed a distinctly American vision of idyllic rural life at a time when many Americans were nostalgic for the country’s pastoral past and art-world elites sought “authentic” expressions by artists without formal training. Her portrayal of a sweeping view of a valley near her home—a theme she revisited throughout her career—uses shades of greens and yellows to depict the land as a patchwork of cultivated fields dotted with small homes and barns nestled within the surrounding hills.

Rebecca Salsbury James, Happy Home: Bowl of Vegetables.

This luminous depiction of root vegetables piled into a bowl showcases Rebecca Salsbury James’s signature style: exacting, hard-edged, and flat. A resident of Taos, New Mexico (living not far from her close friend Georgia O’Keeffe), James focused on reverse glass painting, a challenging medium explored by a number of modernists, although none mastered it to the same extent as James. Happy Home: Bowl of Vegetables is one of her largest and most elaborate works, and demonstrates her precise technique of layering color in pristine compositions.

Modern and Contemporary Art

Remedios Varo, Still Life Reviving (Naturaleza muerta resucitado).

Still Life Reviving, Remedios Varo’s final work and her largest composition on canvas, represents a culmination of Surrealist pathways forged from Madrid to Paris and ultimately to Mexico City. The work’s imagery, combining gothic architecture and invisible cosmic forces, is a prime example of Varo’s artistry. At the time of the artist’s death in 1963, the painting was selected for presentation in her memorial exhibition at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. Shortly after, it was returned to Varo’s mother as a tribute to her, and has rarely been on view since. Visitors can now see this enchanting work on display in Gallery 396.

Simone Leigh, Sharifa.

Chicago-born artist Simone Leigh described Sharifa as “the first portrait I’ve ever done,” depicting Harlem is Nowhere author Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts. Over the past 20 years, Leigh has been celebrated for a sculptural practice that draws from a diverse range of African diasporic traditions. Her work encompasses sculptures in mediums ranging from ceramic to bronze as well as videos, installations, and community-centered gatherings. Rooted in her exploration of black female subjectivity, Leigh’s sculptures give form to the history, knowledge, and experience that a body can hold. Standing more than nine feet tall and cast in a gleaming dark bronze, Sharifa is currently on view in the Museum’s North Garden.

Prints and Drawings

Roy Lichtenstein, Laocoön (Study).

Laocoön (Study) takes as its subject the ancient Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön and His Sons now housed in the Vatican Museums in Rome. One of the most famous ancient marbles in art history with its contorted, writhing figures straining against attacking serpents, the sculpture has been interpreted as an icon of human suffering. Lichtenstein translated the three-dimensional source material into a flat image where the dramatic human forms become secondary to the interweaving serpents, and where figuration itself metaphorically wrestles with abstraction. The result is thoroughly Lichtenstein: an almost universally recognized subject reconceived in the artist’s visual language of primary colors, hard outlines, and enlarged halftone dots.

David Bomberg, The Dancer.

David Bomberg was one of the central figures of early twentieth-century British modernism, specifically the short-lived pre-World War I movement known as Vorticism. Inspired by the speed and efficiency of machine technology, Vorticism’s compositions were marked by bold colors, emphatic lines, and sharp angles. Bomberg’s experimental watercolor, The Dancer, one of the finest of Vorticist drawings, consists of converging arcs, diagonals, and straight lines, its dynamic palette dominated by red, blue, and ochre to convey swirling choreographed movement. Bomberg’s fascination with experimental dance and, in particular, the Russian ballet, had a profound influence on him and is at the heart of The Dancer.

Textiles

Carolyn Mazloomi, Hands Up … Don’t Shoot #2.

Part of Carolyn Mazloomi’s recent series titled “Black History Quilts,” Hands Up … Don’t Shoot #2 is a compelling work that honors the lives of Black people killed by police officers. Using the United States flag’s composition as the foundation, the red stripes include the names of eighty-nine Black people killed by the police while the white stripes act as windows to the underlying image of a slave ship holding enslaved men. In place of fifty stars, fifty Black men are seen in offset rows with red targets on their chest and their hands raised in the air. In the artist’s own words: “Making narrative quilts is my way of addressing issues such as racial profiling, police brutality, and broader systemic inequalities faced by Black communities. It is a soft way to tell hard stories.”